11 October 2010

After thirteen hours of driving Saturday (after I took the three hour GRE Literature in English subject test) and fifteen hours yesterday, I’m home. I’ve only been away for two months, and in most ways, it’s as if nothing has changed while I’ve been gone. But in other ways it feels rather different. It’s almost as if my depth perception is skewed. The rooms seem larger; the lights brighter; the stairs up to my bedroom less steep; the sound of voices, the air conditioner, the flushing toilet, the garage door, the telephone, and the washing machine startling and loud. A familiar strangeness.

I think that these past two months have been primarily a learning experience, and I’ve made a list of the foremost lessons I’ve learned.

1. There is a huge disconnect in the way I perceive things and actual reality. Where this naïveté came from, I have no idea, but I assure you that this has shattered the idealized notions I once held. I hope it did, anyway. At least now I won’t spend the rest of my life believing I was missing out because I don’t have a farm. In fact, I never want to work on any sort of farm again. In my entire life. Ever. Please and thank you.

2. Always take the proffered chances to get to know someone. I never had another opportunity to talk to the French boy and find out his story.

3. You can trust your gut instinct.

4. There’s no such thing as chance. Fate, destiny, serendipity—I think that some things were just meant to be. Mum and I didn’t stop at the church when we saw the Lobster & Chicken Dinner sign or sit at that table with those four ladies by accident. Diana, Margaret, Vivian, and Sally took me under their wings, and I can honestly say that if it were not for their friendships I would not have lasted those two months.

5. We were meant to live in community with others.

This is my last post here. I’ll spend the next few months playing with one of my most favorite people in the world, finishing my novel, and applying for graduate school to pursue a PhD in literature. Thank you all for following along with me on this journey and for encouraging me along the way.

2 October 2010

Thought I'd share with you some photographs...

Sally's cottage from the beach

the rickety stairs leading down to the beach

Sally's cottage (my room is right above the porch)

the back of Sally's cottage

the porch

the view from my bedroom window yesterday morning

my room

the view from my bedroom window this morning

29 September 2010

I felt such relief as I drove up the long gravel driveway with my car sitting lower than usual, put out the Apples and Cider sign one last time, and drove away from the orchard in the early morning fog. Working here hasn’t been a completely terrible experience, but it isn’t an experience I care to repeat. Once I mull on it for a bit, I’ll write a post about what I’ve learned since I’ve been here.

My dear friend Sally has been kind enough to open her seaside cottage to me for the coming week before Dad flies up to drive back with me. As I stepped out of my car in her drive, I was met with the smell of spruce and cedar and sea. It’s a glorious combination that I wish I could capture for you, but I fear I’m not eloquent enough. The best I can do is tell you that it smells of Christmas and the cold Atlantic on a crisp morning.

When I arrived at the cottage, Sally wanted to cook breakfast for me, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d already had toast with almond butter earlier in the morning. She scrambled eggs—her secret ingredient is cottage cheese, which makes the eggs fluffier—and toasted English muffins, and then we sat down together to eat and ended up talking for two hours. How I’ve missed the simple pleasure of conversation over a meal! Afterwards, we went for a strolling walk around Flye Point, and I listened to her stories about what the area was like when she was growing up—she’s been coming here in the summers for sixty-five years.

As we stood on the wind-whipped precipice of the peninsula, gazing out over the cresting, incoming tide and Goose and Gander Islands, I realized how much I will miss the sea when I leave here. The crash of it over the rocky shore; the way it changes from gray to blue to green to black as the sky alters; the movement of the tides; the way it catches and shatters the sun- and moonlight…

I spent most of the afternoon and evening studying for the GRE Literature in English subject test, and then after a dinner of homemade macaroni and cheese, carrots, and salad, Sally and I played a game of Scrabble. She beat me quite soundly. She claimed that it’s only because she’s been playing for sixty years and this was only my first time. I think she’s just good.

I had my choice of five rooms to choose from, and I picked the only one on the second floor. My room is directly over the deep back porch, and I can peer between the cracks in the wooden boards that make up the floor and see the porch below. Three of the walls are made up almost entirely of windows, and the glass panes, after all these years, are ill fitted in their sills, so the air creeps between the cracks. The ocean is only feet away, and my lullaby tonight is the shush, shush of the waves, the creak of the old cottage as it settles down for the night around us, and the melodic alto song of the wind-chime on the porch in the breeze.

28 September 2010

After collecting apples from under the trees in the orchard, winding up the water hoses, and labeling three hundred half-gallon jugs, my work is complete. My job is finished, over, done. Hallelujah.

with my friend Vivian,

at the Blue Hill Fair earlier this month

with my friends Margaret and Sally,

at the American Folk Festival in Bangor last month

this is the windjammer I saw (see 26 September 2010 post)

27 September 2010

Today was a day of firsts, even as it was my last full day of work.

This morning, as I walked up to the top of the drive to put out the Apple and Cider signs, I smelled wood smoke for the first time since I’ve been here. It was chilly here today, overcast and windy. I stood at the edge of the long, deserted road for several minutes, reveling in the burgundy maples, the flaxen birches, the still virescent oaks. The smell of wood burning in a distant fireplace drifted towards me on the wind. Autumn has come to New England.

On the way back from picking apples this afternoon, we stopped on the narrow, twisting causeway that stretches between the isles and collected seaweed as the tide went out. I raked it up into heaps and piled it into the bushel baskets. As I shook the rocks, sand, shells, seagull feathers, and crab carcasses from the seaweed before dumping it in the bushels, I asked dubiously, Tim, you don’t…eat this, do you? You never know with these staunch organics. He thought my question was hilarious and assured me that they didn’t. Not this seaweed, anyways, he said.

It’s taken me two months, but I finally managed to impress Tim today. After lunch we drove the thirty minutes out to Stonington on Deer Isle to pick apples from a certain tree he’d heard about. The tree was beautiful, growing through the crevice between two massive rocks. It was located on a hill, so one rock you could easily walk onto and have access to one side of the tree. That’s the side of the tree Tim chose to work on. The rock on the other side of the tree was massive with a ten-foot, sheer vertical face. I was left to that side to collect the fallen apples from the ground and as many as I could reach with the ladder. No matter which way I position the ladder on the hillside, as soon as I started to ascend, it started to tip. I stood at the base of the rock, hands on my hips, head tilted to study it. I tried a couple of times to get a hand- and toe-hold, but my rubber boots couldn’t find purchase on the rock face. So I pulled off my boots, set them neatly aside, and scaled the rock.

When Tim came around to get another ladder from the truck, he stopped at the base of the rock and stared up at me. How did you get up there? he asked, bewildered.

I climbed, I informed him, stating what I thought was the obvious.

He glanced around and noticed my boots. Are you just in your socks?

Yep, I said calmly from ten feet up in the air.

Why?

Well, could you make it up this in Wellies?

I couldn’t climb that thing at all. What are you, a mountain goat? I think his mouth even hung a bit agape.

In a past life, I answered blithely and continued to gather apples.

26 September 2010

Early this afternoon as I was driving the cracked, twisted roads towards Blue Hill to go to the library, I looked over my shoulder to the east and out on the bay, ivory sails brimming with the salty wind, wooden bow cutting through the whitecaps, was a windjammer.

This, of course, is not the one I saw. I couldn't figure out how to work my camera without running off the road.

25 September 2010

I spent most of the day at the library taking a practice test for the GRE Literature in English subject test. It took me almost three hours to complete, and the two hundred thirty questions turned my brain to mush. I didn’t do too badly, at least for my first time taking a practice test, and I’ve a full two weeks more to study for it.

I finished the test just about the time the library closed, but I didn’t feel like going back to the dim solitude of my apartment, so I pulled a quilt from the back of my car and sprawled on the colorful patchwork beneath a birch tree on the library’s lawn with my almost-complete collection of Mary Stewart books—which, as my prized possession, I carry everywhere with me—and my laptop. When I wasn’t rereading (for only the hundredth or so time) my books or talking to my mother and sister on Skype, I merely lay on my back, the ground cool and damp through my agéd quilt, tracking the progression of a vaporish xebec across the endless sea-sky, a pale kraken lurking after it.